Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by hollowturtle 103 days ago
To anyone with experience on the matter: I'm looking for making a mobile app which resembles more of a game or "a graphical app" and was looking into tech I could use, all I need is a drawing API I could use cross platform for Android and iOS without much hassle, don't need any OS specific widget/component, I just want to draw stuff on the screen, handle touch input and do some network calls. Possibly with a statically typed language that gets compiled and has good performance. So far I excluded React Native because it's javascript and has too many dependencies(especially with expo) and SDL3 with plain C which seemed a little too much low level to dealing with on a mobile phone. Also tried go mobile but seems unmaintained and gives opengl context which is deprecated on iOS, and finally I'd really liked using Raylib but no iOS support :(. Any suggestion?
4 comments
hu3 103 days ago
C# + https://monogame.net

- Desktop: Windows, MacOS, Linux

- Mobile: Android, iOS, iPadOS

- Console: Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch

It used to be XNA but then Microsoft discontinued and the community created the API compatible MonoGame.

Notable games: Terraria (when it was XNA), Stardew Valley, Celeste, Terraria and Fez.

link
debugnik 103 days ago
Note than many games have used Monogame on console but FNA on PC instead.
link
newswasboring 103 days ago
If you are willing to try out Lua there is Love[1]. Supports most common platforms on PC and mobile.

[1] https://love2d.org/

link
hollowturtle 103 days ago
I really like love2d and used prior but lua isn't compiled and network support is limited, although I see they now support https requests on the latest version
link
arjonagelhout 103 days ago
I personally use Skia, in combination with a very thin platform layer. I do use C++ so that might still be a bit too low level, but after having set up everything, the Skia API is really nice for just drawing some text / other primitives onto the screen.

React Native uses Skia under the hood as far as I recall.

link
hollowturtle 103 days ago
I'd love to use Skia. Any template/starter I can look for having both Skia and c++ compiling inside xcode/android studio?
link
gr4vityWall 103 days ago
OpenFL should cover your needs pretty well. https://openfl.org
link